What is the Miracle of the Roses?
Scottsdale’s oldest living holiday tradition is not a light show or a parade. It is a church play about a Mexican farmer and a bishop, staged every December by the families whose grandparents built the church it is staged in.
The story is the one Mexican Catholics know as the Miracle of the Roses. Between December 9 and 12, 1531, on Tepeyac Hill outside Mexico City, Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego. The bishop wanted a sign, so she sent Juan Diego to gather roses on a rocky hill where roses had never grown, and her image appeared on the cloth he carried them in. December 12 is her feast day, one of the biggest days in the Mexican church calendar.
In Scottsdale the story has been sung, acted and paraded since at least 1949. According to the City of Scottsdale’s own historic context report, that year the Gonzales brothers sang a ballad to Our Lady of Guadalupe on the steps of the Little Red Schoolhouse, then the school for the town’s Mexican-American children. The performance moved to a flatbed truck in the barrio. By the mid-1950s it had become a full pageant at the Scottsdale High School auditorium, with a cast of parishioners in costume as Spanish soldiers, monks, Aztec leaders and townspeople. Each December a banner of Our Lady was carried in procession from the Old Adobe Mission to the school and back again.
That big version is gone. It faded out between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, and accounts disagree on exactly when. In 2007, after the mission was restored, the Our Lady of Perpetual Help (OLPH) parish brought the pageant back on a smaller scale. It now runs on the second Saturday of December, on a stage set up inside the 1933 adobe, followed by refreshments on the grounds. In 2026 that is Saturday, December 12, at 4 p.m., the feast day itself, with the parish’s feast-day Mass the evening before.
Going to the pageant
Know which building is which. There are two Our Lady of Perpetual Help churches, about two miles apart. The pageant happens at the Old Adobe Mission, 3817 N. Brown Ave. at First Street, a block east of Scottsdale Road in Old Town. The feast-day Mass for Our Lady of Guadalupe is at the parish’s current church, 7655 E. Main St., which the congregation moved to in 1956 and rebuilt in 1978. In 2026 the Mass is Friday, December 11, and the play is Saturday, December 12. The mission posts the times on its events page each fall.
Get there early. The mission is a single small nave. This site’s mission page compares its capacity to a school bus, and the play has to share the room with a stage. The listing gives no ticketing, reservations or price. We found no published charge, but if you are bringing a group, call the OLPH pastoral receptionist (480-947-4331) first.
Park once, walk. The mission’s own lot is a handful of spaces. The free public garages behind the Main Street galleries and off Second Street are a few minutes’ walk south. December sunset comes before 5:30, so the post-play refreshments on the mission grounds happen in the cool dark. Bring a layer.
Treat it as worship, not a show. This is a devotional reenactment put on by a parish, in a consecrated church, with parishioners in the roles. Dress as you would for church, ask before photographing anyone, and save the applause cues for when the room gives them.
Make a December of it. The mission is busy all month. Its calendar for 2026 also lists a Live Nativity with live performers and animals on Saturday, December 19, 5–6:30 p.m., followed by a chorale concert inside the mission from 7 to 8 p.m. The mission is also a partner in the October Día de los Muertos on the Civic Center. For the city’s lights, trolleys and tree lightings, see Scottsdazzle and our holiday season guide. The pageant is the most local of all of them.
From the schoolhouse steps to Scottsdale High
The pageant came out of the barrio, the Mexican-American neighborhood that grew south and east of the original townsite after the cotton boom of the 1910s. (Our note on the barrio under the Civic Center tells what happened to it.) Those families built the adobe church on Brown Avenue between the late 1920s and 1933. When tinsmith and catechist Bernabé Herrera made its windows, Salt River Stories records that he made them tell the Miracle of the Roses, “an inspiration for the church project.” The Guadalupe story was in the building from the beginning.
The devotion got its own statue, though the accounts of it don’t agree. Salt River Stories says that in 1945 Guadalupe Dominguez gave the parish a figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a prayer for her son-in-law’s safe return from World War II, and that the statue moved with the parish from the adobe to the Miller Road grounds, where it now stands in a small chapel at the northwest corner of the property. The parish’s own history says Guadalupe Dominguez donated a carved wooden statue of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The Old Adobe Mission says Guadalupe and Miguel Dominguez gave a hand-carved statue of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, made in Guadalajara, in the early 1950s. Whether that is two statues from one family or one statue remembered three ways, the parish office could settle. Our parish note lays out all three.
The sources then split on dates, and both versions deserve to be on the record:
- 1949. The city’s Historic Context for Scottsdale’s Development as an Arts Colony & Tourist Destination (Liz Wilson and Debbie Abele, revised 2004) says a pageant “known as ‘The Miracle of the Roses’ started on the steps of the Little Red Schoolhouse when the Gonzales brothers sang a ballad to Our Lady of Guadalupe.” It grew into a presentation from a flatbed truck in the barrio and then an outdoor pageant with a candlelight procession through town, attended by residents and tourists. City historian Joan Fudala also dates the start to 1949. She credits OLPH parishioners, who played the parts and supplied the mariachi music, and says townsfolk worked with artists including Jesús Corral, Paul Coze, Clare Boothe Luce and Avis Read to decorate Old Town for it.
- 1953. The parish’s own history says that in 1953 “the Mexican families obtained [Father Eugene Maguire’s] permission to plan a pageant honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe and thus began a yearly Miracle of the Roses event which eventually included the area’s businessmen and government officials.” Salt River Stories, drawing on the parish’s photographs, dates the pageant at Scottsdale High School to “each December from 1953 to 1966.”
These versions don’t contradict each other. They describe different stages: a song and a truck-bed performance first, then a parish-sanctioned production in a real auditorium. But no source we found says that outright. Fudala’s column runs the 1949 founding straight through to the pageant, and the parish history starts its count in 1953.
The parish’s photo captions show what the high-school era looked like. Women made the banner, costumes, props and stage sets. A young woman was chosen each year to play Our Lady; one surviving photo shows Margaret Medina being fitted for the role. Young men played Juan Diego, Spanish soldiers and monks, and costumed soldiers worked the crowd. The procession carried the banner from the mission along First Street near Scottsdale Road to the school, and after the play Our Lady was carried back to the mission. Governor Ernest McFarland appears in the parish’s photographs as an honored guest. The Scottsdale Historical Society’s Lois McFarland, interviewed in 2019, remembered members of the Hispanic, Yaqui, Pima, Apache and Mohave communities walking in it. In her account the procession was held on the Saturday nearest December 12.
How it ended, and how it came back
There is a second disagreement about the end. Salt River Stories calls it a 13-year tradition, 1953–1966. The Old Adobe Mission’s own timeline gives a third date, listing “the last Miracle of the Roses” held by the Mexican community under 1967. The same timeline says more than 7,000 people, “including governors and ambassadors,” attended the annual festivities, a figure we have seen only in the mission’s account. Fudala says it was “phased out in the early 1970s,” and the 2019 Images Arizona account agrees, blaming traffic congestion and the advancing ages of the pageant’s performers. Those were also the years, roughly 1968 to 1975, when the city cleared much of the barrio for the Civic Center, and when the parish was planning a bigger church on Miller Road. Fudala adds that in the 1970s Scottsdale Parks & Recreation co-hosted a “similar version” called Las Posadas, with a parade and an event at the Civic Center. Whether that was a continuation, a replacement or a separate tradition, the record doesn’t say.
The revival followed the mission’s restoration. Volunteers began rescuing the abandoned adobe in 2002, and Mass returned in 2003. According to Images Arizona, the Miracle of the Roses was “renewed — albeit smaller in scope — in 2007.” That year is the one stated date we have for the revival. Fudala’s column says only that the event “has been reprised by the OLPH as part of the Old Mission Church restoration.” The 2019 edition was at 4 p.m. on Saturday, December 14. The current format, as the mission describes it, reenacts “the events of December 12, 1531” on the second Saturday of December, with actors on a stage inside the mission and light refreshments outside afterward.
A note on the name
This site calls Herrera’s stained glass “the Miracle of the Roses.” Salt River Stories supports that much: the windows “retold the Miracle of the Roses story.” Whether the windows were ever formally titled that, or whether the name has simply attached to them from the pageant, we could not establish. Accounts of the mission, including this site’s own, have sometimes run the window, the 1949 song and the 1953 pageant together as one thing. They are three related things that share a story.
Where the rest of the record lives
The pageant’s best evidence is still in drawers. The OLPH parish (480-947-4331) holds the photographs Salt River Stories reproduced and probably the scripts and cast lists. The Scottsdale Historical Society has programs and images from the 1950s–1970s. The December issues of the Scottsdale Progress on microfilm at the Civic Center Library would settle the procession routes, the Scottsdale High years and the final date. The descendants of the Corral, Gonzales and Herrera families can answer what no newspaper covered: who sang in 1949, and what the song was.